Dr Clare Corbould

BA (Hons) PhD (Sydney)
Senior Lecturer
Room 851 Brennan Building

+61 2 9036 9662

Clare Corbould completed her BA (Hons) in 1997 and doctorate in 2005. She joined the department in 2003. Her main interests are the history of African Americans and the African diaspora. Other interests include histories of sound, performance, and the politics and cultures of United States empire.

Current Projects

• Ophelia Settle Egypt: Social science research, race and gender in the United States, 1930-1950

Selected Publications

Books

Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939 (Harvard University Press, 2009)

Articles

"Streets, Sounds and Identity in Interwar Harlem," Journal of Social History 40, 4 (Summer 2007): 859-894.

“US Imperialism in the Twentieth Century?” Australasian Journal of American Studies 24, no. 2 (Dec. 2005): 128-141.

Book Chapters

"'At the Feet of Dessalines': African American and Mass Culture in the Interwar Years," collection on African Americans and Mass Culture, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage

"Fighting Terror with Words: African-American Women Playwrights, Lynching and Rape in the Jim Crow American South,” in Feminism and the Body, ed. Catherine Kevin (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming 2009).

“African Americans and the Global Black World, 1919-1935,” Global America, ed. Frank A. Ninkovich et al, Imprint Publications, Chicago, in press.

Other Publications

"Race and Imperial Identities: Introduction," in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of a Modern American State, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco Scarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 193-198

Areas of teaching and research supervision

Teaching

• HSTY1076: American History from Lincoln to Clinton
• HSTY2609 African American History and Culture
• HSTY2667 US Imperialism in the Twentieth Century?
• HSTY2691 Writing History
• HSTY6999 American Power, Past and Present

Awarded a Faculty of Arts Teaching Excellence Award, 2005

Supervision

• Topics in US history, especially African American history, US imperial history, and US history in the 1920s and 1930s

Conference Activity

Invited Presentations

• 2009: “‘At the Feet of Dessalines’: Black Americans, the Haitian Revolution and the Myths of History,” History Seminar Series, University of Newcastle
• 2008: “Gender and the Black Diaspora in African American Women's Writing, 1919-1939,” Sydney Feminist History Group
• 2008: “Haiti’s Revolution on Harlem’s Stage: African Americans Remake History, 1919-1945,” Flinders University History Department Seminar
• 2007: "Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Advent of Mass Culture, 1890-1930," Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Papers

• 2008: “Making Public the Sidelined Past: Toussaint, Dessalines, and Christophe on the Interwar Harlem Stage,” Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, New York
• 2007: Rape and Lynching in Interwar America,” Feminism and the Body, King’s College London
• 2006: “Shock Tomb Opening: King Tut Black?” Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association (ANZASA) Conference, University of Tasmania, Launceston
• 2005: “‘Flyin’ home on the Black Star Line’: Rethinking the Garvey Movement,” Middle Passages: The Oceanic Voyage as Social Process, International Centre for Convict Studies and the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia, Fremantle, Australia
• 2005: “Making History During the Harlem Renaissance,” Legacies of Slavery: Comparative Perspectives, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University, Canberra
• 2004: “Sounds Like Africa: Listening to the Harlem Renaissance,” ANZASA Conference, Auckland University, Auckland
• 2002: “‘That Land of Freedom’: Haiti in Black American Imaginations, 1919-1936,” ANZASA Conference, Deakin University, Geelong
• 2001: “‘That Land of Freedom:’ Haiti in the Imagination of African Americans, 1919-1935,” delivered in absentia, Diaspora Paradigms Conference, Michigan State University
• 2001: “African Americans and the Global Black World, 1919-1935,” Global America Conference at the Charles Warren Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• 2000: “Black Heroes and American Manhood on the 1920s Stage,” Northeastern Modern Language Association (NEMLA) Annual Conference, Buffalo, NY
• 1999: “‘What is modernism to me?’ Individual Selves and Collective Identities in African-American Women’s Writing, 1920-1935,” Third Annual History and Theory Conference: Sex Gender Theory, the University of California, Irvine, November 13-14, 1999

Other Activities

Co-organiser, "Patriotism, Memory, History: Postgraduate Masterclass," 22-24 July 2009

Co-organizer, "Making Empire Visible in the Metropole: Comparative Imperial Transformations in America, Australia, England and France," Sydney, 3-4 July, 2008. Sponsored by the World University Network (WUN), University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, and the Nation-Empire-Globe research cluster, University of Sydney.

Editor, Book reviews, History and related disciplines, Australasian Journal of American Studies, 2007-2009

Co-convenor, Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association biennial conference at the University of Sydney, July 2008